The invention relates to microprocessor-assisted musical instruments.
As microprocessors penetrate further into the marketplace, more products are appearing that enable people who have no formal training in music to actually produce music like a trained musician. Some instruments and devices that are appearing store the musical score in digital form and play it back in response to input signals generated by the user when the instrument is played. Since the music is stored in the instrument, the user need not have the ability to create the required notes of the melody but need only have the ability to recreate the rhythm of the particular song or music being played. These instruments and devices are making music much more accessible to everybody.
Among the instruments that are available, there are a number of mechanical and electrical toy products that allow the player to step through the single tones of a melody. The simplest forms of this are little piano shaped toys that have one or a couple of keys which when depressed advance a melody by one note and sound the next tone in the melody which is encoded on a mechanical drum. The electrical version of this ability can be seen in some electronic keyboards that have a mode called "single key" play whereby a sequence of notes that the player has played and recorded on the keyboard can be "played" back by pushing the "single key play" button (on/off switch) sequentially with the rhythm of the single note melody. Each time the key is pressed, the next note in the melody is played.
There was an instrument called a "sequential drum" that behaved in a similar fashion. When the drum was struck a piezoelectric pickup created an on/off event which a computer registered and then used as a trigger to sound the next tone in a melodic note sequence.
There are also recordings that are made for a variety of music types where a single instrument or, more commonly, the vocal part of a song is omitted from the audio mix of an ensemble recording such as a rock band or orchestra. These recordings available on vinyl records, magnetic tape, and CDs have been the basis for the commercial products known as MusicMinusOne and for the very popular karoeke that originated in Japan.